This Week's Food

We hope you have a wonderful Holiday and get to enjoy some delicious food and time with friends, family, and dogs. :)

A little, organic bird may have told you that we have expanded Family Dinner into Portland, Maine. (And if you didn't know, now you know.) One of the very best parts of working in a new community is meeting the folks who make up its fabric. We met Lee and Bryna from LB Kitchen early in our Portland wanderings and fell in love immediately.

I'm willing to admit to having a cookbook problem. Well, technically two problems. First, I can't seem to stop buying them and second, I can't seem to use them for their intended purpose. So many of them are like museum pieces, oohed- and aahed over at first review and then rarely referred to again.  A great example the gastronomic magnum opus "Paul Bocuse: The Complete Recipes"; the exhaustive collection of the French Masterchef. It includes such works as Le Lievre a la Royale;  a wild rabbit with foie gras and truffles cooked in a sauce of its own blood. Doesn't exactly scream Approachable Weeknight Meal.

Working to fight food insecurity in our neighborhoods has always been at the core of Family Dinner. In the past year we have donated over $31,894.90 worth of local food to our friends at the Greater Boston Food Bank, La Colaborativa in Chelsea, My Brother's Table in Lynn, the Woburn Food Pantry, Elevate Youth, Lifebridge in Gloucester and many more.

Right after the delights of Thanksgiving--the carb loading, the football, the snoring dads, and the naps--comes Black Friday. The "Only in America" Hellscape that turns normal people into mouth-breathing zombies fueled by capitalist mind games who are drunk on coupons. 

One of our favorite fall veggies is the Brussels Sprout. Named after the city in Belgium, these little wannabe cabbages were brought to the US in the 18th century to delight our autumnal palates. They look like JV cabbages because they come from the same family (genus Brassica) and first cousins in this this family are called cruciferous vegetables.  They got that odd little name because their four-petaled flowers look like a crucifer, or cross. 

The time has come! Tomorrow we will be doing our first deliveries in Maine. We are pleased as punch to be working with so many local growers and producers to put this first share together. Some of their delicious products will also make their way into our Massachusetts shares, so we are spreading the deliciousness.

My father, the inimitable Andy Baumgartner, loved free stuff.  The man was an aficionado for all the little tchotchkes that come with a trip to the bank, a conference or even the dentist.  When you would chide him for picking up yet another TD Bank branded chapstick he would say "what do you want from me? They were giving them away!"

This year's turkeys will be from Tide Mill Organic Farm in Edmunds, Maine, a 200-year/ninth generation family operation!  The birds grow up eating fresh green grass and organic grains, and enjoying fresh air and Edmunds' notoriously varied coastal weather.  Processing occurs on the farm, which means the turkeys do not have to endure the stress of transport.  Tide Mill Organic Farm turkey is always tender and delicious because of the respect and care with which they were raised.  Turkeys will be delivered fresh or previously frozen.

You've probably heard, likely because we can't shut up about it, that Family Dinner is soon expanding to Maine.  

We were drawn to Portland for its incredibly diverse and vibrant food ecosystem and some truly incredible restaurants.  Portland's Cong Tu Bot made it onto the NYT Top 50 Restaurants last week with the Times claiming "Happiness is a bowl of Cong Tu Bot’s chao chay on a chilly Maine morning." During the pandemic Cong Tu Bot transitioned into a daytime cafe and the throngs of people waiting outside every day are evidence that was a good call.  Reservations not accepted, and per their eerily delightful website, neither are racists. "Seriously tho, no reservations and no racists please." My kind of folks and my kind of food. Hell, yes.

Monday is Indigenous People’s Day. To highlight this, we will be doing a couple of things this week. First, a land acknowledgement of the land on which we operate and the land from where the food was sourced or prepared.

We have a lot to celebrate here at Family Dinner!

It is our 4 year anniversary and our one year anniversary at our space in Woburn. Add to that our expansion to Maine AND that there's a new episode of Ted Lasso dropping tonight and we are simply buzzing with excitement. (Seriously, if you haven't yet watched Ted Lasso, allow our encouraging voice to join the chorus urging you to do so. It's like hugging a puppy while simultaneously eating a warm chocolate chip cookie.)

"Mushrooms are a fascinating crop! They’re not plants—they’re members of the fungus family. Unlike wild mushrooms that spring up only when seasonal conditions are ripe, cultivated mushrooms can be grown indoors year-round, provided the climate conditions are right.